Twitter is trying to play its "look how we facilitate things like the Arab Spring" card. So they are not-so-subtly suggesting that fragmenting the world of short form text messages would destroy freedom. After all, how can the twitterverse stand as a bulwark against a totalitarian state when google+ is breaking news too?

I imagine their ultimate fear is that the next step is text message aggregators and the loss of their "brand".

All of it makes me want to send them an email suggesting they get off my lawn.

I think it would be helpful if courses with a research paper have that as their only requirement. The amount of time, effort and skill to do it properly can easily eat up 3 credits worth of effort. The problem, as I see it, is that professors will casually assign a research paper, a presentation, a midterm and a final all in the same course. Further, the research paper will often wind up as only a small fraction of the grade with the midterm and final as the primary determinant of the grade. So the research paper becomes a pro forma exercise where anything reasonably intelligible can pass.

I always thought that was ridiculous because reading and synthesizing a textbook is pretty easy next to the effort needed to write a decent paper on a real world topic and all the complexities attached thereto. If I had my magic wand I'd put one research paper course right at the front of every curriculum and then another required to capstone the curriculum. It would give both the student and the institution the opportunity to see the improvement of the student as someone who can truly use and synthesize information in a useful way.

Personally I think the problem is that trade policies have offshored US jobs faster than they could be created. So people flooded into Higher Ed out of desperation in the hopes that education would uniformly preserve the American middle class.

It helped. But the hole is just too deep. Too many jobs left America forever and not all of those displaced workers belonged in a college. Many belonged in a textile mill, or stamping plastic toys in an assembly line. Now they are kinda forced into college and the government is there with the money because it seems better to educate people than stem the offshoring phenomenon that has made the top 1% even 1 percentier.

So those same people who sent the jobs overseas now start to complain about the lack of bang for the educational buck. Why aren't these people all the next Steve Jobs. And then for-profit schools come along and rape the people who not even the most desperate traditional school would accept. And then I guess the end game is everyone throws up their hands and says "fuck it, there is nothing we can do, here is a URL, best of luck".

Well, if we're doing manned space travel purely for the opportunity to feel good about our species then it makes a lot more sense to go to Mars or to the moons of Jupiter. We would not have to wait nearly as long and it would have a similar impact on the human psyche.

This notion of building a giant ship to go to another solar system is extraordinarily impractical. The time lag for communications alone would make it very easy to ignore or forget about or just get kinda jaded over the whole thing (oh, this really happened 4 years ago?)

I can't see the case for exploring outside the solar system we are in when so much of it is unexplored and when the next nearest solar system is extremely far away. It would have been like Columbus sailing for the New World when only 6% of Spain had been explored.

I'm sure I'm missing something but the whole beauty of an SoC design is its simplicity. It seems to me there should not ever be a need to "reinstall" when the operating system is baked into the hardware. The only thing that should need to be reset is the settings.

So if you just reset all settings it would be essentially the same as a clean install. I know it doesn't work that way. I don't know why it doesn't. It should.

I've had cable installers come and go for years and years. All they ever do is use their meter to check the signals coming through the line. If the signals are good that is all they are interested in.

Frankly it is not all that hard to train someone to hook a cable up to a meter and check to see if the numbers are in acceptable ranges. In rare cases where the signals are off they start to replace splitters working backward from the cable modem. If that doesn't work they give up and blame neighborhood saturation.

So i don't know why you'd want to pay these guys a lot of money. They aren't doing highly skilled work. Now, if you're talking about the network engineers who have to design and fix the grid that is an entirely different story. Those are obviously highly skilled people who have to know their stuff. The guys plugging in modems? Not so much.

Maybe I'm a cynic but I see everything as a marketing plot. As soon as I read that this was an outsourced PR guy that set my marketing BS radar on high alert.

Could this just be some douche and all of this happen randomly? It is possible. In fact that is starting to look like it is the case. But you're right--if we see sales of the controller go through the roof you can bet there will be companies all over the world looking to repeat this model. Look for someone to cause an internet uproar but make sure it is someone you can cut loose and bad mouth as soon as the viral load hits.

I guess I always will be suspicious of people who seem to fall very neatly into a pre-defined stereotype (particularly a negative one) without even the slightest hint of cognitive dissonance. I don't like to think such people exist.

Every time I'm looking for a red light camera I'm not looking for crossing pedestrians.

Every time I'm looking for a speedtrap I'm not watching the road.

Every time I'm watching for a cruiser sneaking up behind me (marked and unmarked) I'm not looking forward.

I'd love to see more hard research on whether these measures make us more safe or less safe overall. If I were less concerned about getting a goddamed ticket I'd probably be a safer driver overall (even if it means I speed more or run more red lights).

A couple of times it has turned into a very large clusterfuck. Stuff breaks that seems like it should not break for any reason ever. But there you are with 50 people saying that 911 won't work. So these updates break stuff. They break important stuff and every piece of hardware (even within the same hardware line) reacts a little bit differently.

It is one of the glaring weaknesses of a diversified culture (as compared to the locked down monoculture of Apple).

For light note taking where you only need to have a few highlights, draw some things, add notations..Supernote is awesome. I'm able to take perfectly acceptable electronic notes on my eee pad slider. It can handle my finger writing words as fast as I can write them. It does NOT convert what I write with my finger into text, it just accepts the input as a "picture" and places it as a word on the line.

Google has a search funnel. As long as everything they do leads people to google searches--they're good.

They don't have to release the very best and most polished stuff. They aren't Apple. It isn't like they will be shipping a physical product that people will either love or hate for months, or years (GoogleTV is an exception..a bad exception). So they throw a lot of stuff up into the cloud, make it free, let people futz around with it and then sometimes they cease support. When they do, it is because the product isn't driving traffic to search. Please always remember search and adwords are still 90+% of Google's revenue. From a company wide standpoint it is 'all that matters'.

You may look at google and think they want to be in the Music business. You'd be wrong. They want you to think of Google when you need to search for something. If having a music service bolted on makes you more likely to search using Google, then they win. Period. Full stop.

That is risky. It is more challenging than you might think to just turn trade off.

America, however, is completely within its right to ramp up inspections of imported items to look for unsafe levels of contaminants. If enough lots get rejected then China will have the appropriate incentive to make changes over time. But that would require hiring ZOMG more government job killing bureaucrats.

Let's try to focus the blame where it makes the most sense. We have a government in the US that is inspecting only a tiny fraction of imports and even what they do inspect is mostly subject to only a cursory glance.